L

Landing Page – The landing page is the page on which a visitor “lands” after clicking a:

search engine listing

hyperlink

email link

banner ad

ppc ad

other ad/link

The landing page can be a site’s homepage, but is usually a page designed to appeal to users who click-through from a specific ad or link. Similar to a doorway page, but a legitimate marketing function — it is used for counting and tracking arrivals and determining the effectiveness of a marketing campaign.

Well designed landing pages that are relevant to a user’s keyword query, will improve conversion rates, and play a critical role in Search Engine Marketing.

Landing Page Quality Scores – A measure used by Google to help filter noisy ads out of their AdWords [link:] program.

When Google AdWords [link:] launched, affiliates and arbitrage players made up a large portion of their ad market — as more mainstream companies have spent on search marketing, Google [link:] has done many measures to try to keep their ads relevant.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) – An algebraic model of document retrieval based on a singular value decomposition of the vectorial space of index terms.

Link – See hyperlink [link:]

Link Baiting – The art of targeting, creating, and formatting information that provokes the target audience to point high quality links at your site. Many link baiting techniques are targeted at social media [link:] and bloggers [link:].

The types of link bait vary tremendously, but they include highly informative articles or news stories, useful resources and sometimes controversial or sensationalistic content.

Link baiting is a technique used to help a site improve its Link Popularity [link:] and Page Rank [link:]. Some sites use link baiting as the centerpiece of a website marketing campaign.

Link Building – The process of building high quality inbound links to and from your website. Over time, search engines will evaluate links pointing to your website in order to influence their decisions whether or not to trust that your website is authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy.

Link Bursts – A rapid increase in the quantity of links pointing at a website.

When links occur naturally they generally develop over time. In some cases it may make sense that popular viral articles receive many links quickly, but in those cases there are typically other signs of quality as well, such as:

Increased usage data

Increase in brand related search queries

Traffic from the link sources to the site being linked at

Many of the new links coming from new pages on trusted domains

Link Churn – The rate at which a site loses links.

Link Equity – A measure of how strong a site is based on its inbound link popularity and the authority [link:] of the sites providing those links (i.e. the total number and overall quality of the links pointing to your website).

Link Exchange – A link exchange is a quid pro quo arrangement or reciprocal link [link:] exchange between two sites. Reciprocal links usually lead to the home page of the associate site.

Link Farm – Website or group of websites which exercises little to no editorial control when linking to other sites. FFA [link:] pages, for example, are link farms.

Link Hoarding – A method of trying to keep all your link popularity by not linking out to other sites, or linking out using JavaScript or through cheesy redirects.

Generally, link hoarding is a bad idea for the following reasons:

Many authority sites were at one point hub sites that freely linked out to other relevant resources

If you are unwilling to link out to other sites, people are going to be less likely to link to your site

“Of course, folks never know when we’re going to adjust our scoring. It’s pretty easy to spot domains that are hoarding PageRank; that can be just another factor in scoring. If you work really hard to boost your authority-like score while trying to minimize your hub-like score, that sets your site apart from most domains. Just something to bear in mind.”
~ Matt Cutts, Google

Link Popularity – The number and quality of links pointing at a website. Page Rank is achieved when backlinks [link:] are located on reputable, relevant sites rather than so-called Link Farms. Most search engines use link popularity as a factor in their algorithmic results.

For competitive search queries link quality counts much more than link quantity. Google typically shows a smaller sample of known linkage data than the other engines do, even though Google still counts many of the links they do not show when you do a link: search.

Link Rot – A measure of how many and what percent of a website’s links are broken.

Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the most common reasons are:

A website going offline

Linking to content which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons)

Moving a page’s location

Changing a domain’s content management system

Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site’s links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant.

Local Search – Local search refers to both the addition of geographical keywords (cities, streets, etc.) to search terms. Also refers to YellowPages-type search engines such as Google Maps [link: ], Yahoo! Local [link: ], etc. to find business services in a particular zip code.

Search engine placement services use local SEO to help traditional “brick and mortar businesses” connect with customers in their community.

Local Search Optimization – The process of increasing the amount of visitors to a website by ranking high for specific locality-based keyword phrases in search engines, plus the addition of geographical keywords in the search phrase (cities, streets, zip codes). Local SEO is a powerful tool attracting local customers, especially for local small businesses.

Log Files – Server files which show you what your leading sources of traffic are and what people are search for to find your website.

Log files DO NOT typically show as much data as analytics programs would — if they do, it is generally not in a format that is as useful beyond seeing the top few stats.

In my experience, when trying to compare log files to actual website analytics the waters are generally very muddy. Discrepancies between actual traffic and all server traffic should be expected, making this source of traffic a little unreliable.

Long-Tail Keywords – The phrase “The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters)” was first coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired Magazine article to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. The term long tail is also generally used in statistics, often applied in relation to wealth distributions or vocabulary use.

More recently the word long-tail is being used to describe a (niche) longer keyword focus while writing content for search engine optimization (i.e. a keyword phrase where several words are used to specify the search query).

Example uses of landing pages are newsletter sign up forms, download demonstration trial software and purchasing of a product or service.

Link bait

Useful or entertaining web content which compels users to link to it.

Link building

Requesting links from webmasters of other sites for the purpose of increasing your “link popularity” and/or “PageRank.”

Considerations for link building can include directory submissions and press release syndication.

Link farm

A link farm is a group of highly interlinked websites with the purposes of inflating link popularity (or PR). A link farm is a form of spamdexing, spamming the index of a search engine.

Link popularity

When other web sites link to your site, your site will rank better in certain search engines. The more web pages that link to you, the better your link popularity.

Link spam

Links between pages that are specifically set up to take advantage of link-based ranking algorithms such as Google’s PageRank (PR).

Links

text or graphics that, when clicked on, take the Internet user to another web page location. Links are expressed as URLs.

Log file

All accesses to a web site can be logged by the web server. Data that is usually logged includes date and time, filename accessed, user’s IP address, referring web page, user’s browser software and version, and cookie data.

LSI – Latent Semantic Indexing

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) can discover that documents have words which are often used in the same context. For example, “apple” and “computer” will also have “Mac OS” and are therefore also relevant. The same thing applies with “windows” as an operating system as opposed to an invention for looking through walls. It’s all about trying to understand more about the nature and intent of the user query and returning information in context with the user’s search, even when they give little clue as to the actual nature of the search. Incidentally, LSI is used by other search engines besides Google.”